In a two-part article called, “Why I Give My 9-Year-Old Pot”, writer and parent Marie Myung-Ok Lee talks about using cannabis as a therapy to treat her nine-year-old son’s pain, irritable bowel, and other effects from his autism. You should really read Part One and Part Two in full, but I will just give you some snippets of the positive responses this little boy named “J.” has experienced from medical marijuana:
My son J has autism. He’s also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us.
We made the cookies with the marijuana olive oil, starting J off with half a small cookie, eaten after dinner. J normally goes to bed around 7:30 p.m.; by 6:30 he declared he was tired and conked out. We checked on him hourly. As we anxiously peeked in, half-expecting some red-eyed ogre from Reefer Madness to come leaping out at us, we saw instead that he was sleeping peacefully. Usually, his sleep is shallow and restless. J also woke up happy.
[S]ince we started him on his “special tea,” J’s little face, which is sometimes a mask of pain, has softened. He smiles more.
[My mother] remarked that J seems calmer. As we were preparing for a trip to the park, J disappeared, and we wondered if he was going to throw one of his tantrums. Instead, he returned with Grandma’s shoes, laying them in front of her, even carefully adjusting them so that they were parallel and easy to step into. He looked into her face, and smiled.
Pre-pot, J. ate things that weren’t food. There’s a name for this: pica. … His pica become so uncontrollable we couldn’t let him sleep with a pajama top (it would be gone by morning) or a pillow (ditto the case and the stuffing)…. The worst part was watching him scream in pain on the toilet, when what went in had to come out. I had nightmares about long threads knotting in digestive organs. (TMI? Welcome to our life!)
Almost immediately after we started the cannabis, the pica stopped. Just stopped. J. now sleeps with his organic wool-and-cotton, hypoallergenic, temptingly chewable comforter. He pulls it up to his chin at night and declares, “I’m cozy!”
Next, we started seeing changes in J.’s school reports. … At one parent meeting in August (J. is on an extended school year), his teacher excitedly presented his June-July “aggression” chart. An aggression is defined as any attempt or instance of hitting, kicking, biting, or pinching another person. For the past year, he’d consistently had 30 to 50 aggressions in a school day, with a one-time high of 300. The charts for June through July, by contrast, showed he was actually having days—sometimes one after another—with zero aggressions.
When J. was in his dark phase, we spent our time out of sight, out of mind, inside our house with a screeching, violent, food-and-dish-flinging J. The sounds were contained by double-paned windows (when they weren’t broken). Now, within our family, we’ve reached a lovely homeostasis: household goods unbroken, our arms and J.’s face unscratched.
Fortunately for Marie, she lives in Rhode Island, one of the thirteen states that allow parents to use this non-toxic therapeutically active herb for their severely ill child. Marie also tells of her life with J. prior to cannabis and how doctors were quick to prescribe Risperdal (“Thorazine for kids”, she calls it,) a drug that has never been studied for long-term safety in children and has a list of nasty side effects. Almost a quarter million children under age 12 were prescribed Risperdal last year and from 2000-2004, 45 children died from it and five other popular “atypical antipsychotics”. Fortunately for J., his mother and his doctor chose a much safer and more effective alternative in cannabis.
